Q&A With the Pilot, Volume 6

AN OLD-TIMEY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SESSION.

Eons ago, in 2002, a column called Ask the Pilot, hosted by yours truly, started running in the online magazine Salon, in which I fielded reader-submitted questions about air travel. It’s a good idea, I think, to touch back now and then on the format that got this venerable enterprise started. It’s Ask the Pilot classic, if you will.

Q: I appreciated your rant about excessive public address announcements at airports and during flight. However, announcements from the cockpit can’t escape attention. Seriously, can some of your fellow pilots please stay quiet? We get what we need from the cabin crew; we don’t need the pilots piling on.

I’m okay with pilot PAs so long as they are professional-sounding, informational, jargon-free and brief.

I make one prior to departure. I say our names, then I give the flight time (I always round the minutes to zero or five), the approximate arrival time, and maybe a short description of the arrival weather. The whole thing takes fifteen seconds.

The names part is just to remind people that actual human beings are driving their plane. There’s such a disconnect between the cabin and cockpit; most passengers never even lay eyes on the individuals taking them across the country or across the ocean.

I do not start in with, “It’s a great day for flyin,’ and we’ve got eight of our best flight attendants back there for your safety and comfort,” blah blah blah. That style of folky-hokey chatter is embarrassing.

Q: When I fly, I always love the ka-thunk sound of landing gear coming down, as it signals we’re almost to our destination. Sometimes I notice it comes down much closer to touchdown than other times. Why?

Planes normally drop their landing gear at around 2,000 feet above the ground, or when passing what we call the “final approach fix.” That’s maybe three minutes from touchdown, give or take. But it varies, depending on airspeed, spacing with other traffic, and so on. Lowering the gear has a significant aerodynamic impact, mainly in the adding of wind resistance (that is, drag). Sometimes we drop it early to help slow down.

I remember going into JFK early one morning. The controllers initially kept us high and fast, then suddenly gave us a “slam dunk” clearance straight to the runway. We put the gear out at like 5,000 feet to slow down and increase our descent to the maximum possible rate. No pilot likes doing this, as it’s noisy and maybe a little disconcerting for passengers. But under the circumstances, it worked great.

At most carriers the policy is to have the gear down and the plane fully configured for landing no later than a thousand feet above the ground. The idea is to minimize power and pitch adjustments and maintain what pilots call a “stabilized approach.”

Q: And please cure this stupid irrational fear once and for all: could pilots ever forget to deploy the landing gear? What are the safeguards to ensure this doesn’t happen?

Verifying that the gear is down and locked is one of the checklist items prior to landing. There are also configuration warnings that will sound if the plane passes a certain altitude without the gear (or wing flaps) in the correct position.

On top of all that, if you still somehow managed to forget, the whole picture would look and feel wrong. The plane’s attitude would be off, the power settings would be strange, the sounds would be different.

Pilots of small private planes are known to land with their gear up from time to time, but I can’t imagine this happening in a commercial jet.

Q: I recently flew on a 737-900, in row 13. I was surprised to find that there was no window in this row, although there was ample space for one. Why?

You see this on a lot of planes. Usually it’s because there’s some sort of internal component — ducting, framing, or some other structural assembly — that doesn’t allow space for a window. Some turboprops are missing a window directly adjacent to the propeller blades, and you’ll find a strip of reinforced plating there instead. This is to prevent damage if, during icing conditions, the blades shed chunks of ice.

Q: I often listen in to air traffic control on the internet. On the approach control frequencies, pilots will call in and identify themselves “with” a character from the phonetic alphabet. For example, “Approach this is United 515 at ten thousand with Alpha or “Approach United 827, five thousand feet with Uniform.” What does this mean?

Every airport puts out a broadcast that gives the current weather, approaches and runways in use, and assorted other info particular to the airport at that moment (some of it, to be honest, unnecessary). This broadcast, called ATIS (automatic terminal information service), is identified phonetically between A and Z.

On initial contact with approach control (or with ground or clearance control when departing), pilots are asked to report in with the most current letter, verifying they’ve listened to the broadcast and have an idea of what’s going on. Each time something is updated, the broadcast advances to the next letter. I will call in “with Sierra,” and the annoyed controller will snap back, “Information Tango is now up.”

I use the words “broadcast,” and “listened to,” because traditionally crews would tune to a radio frequency for ATIS, and transcribe its highlights onto a slip of paper. Nowadays, at most larger airports, it’s delivered through a cockpit datalink printout or is pulled up on our iPads.

For no useful reason, much of the typical ATIS report is abbreviated and coded using all kinds of nonstandard shorthand, and takes some deciphering. Aviation is frustratingly averse to the use of actual words, preferring instead a soup of acronyms and gibberish. I mean, it’s not the 1950s anymore and we aren’t using teletype machines to communicate.

Q: Tell us something weird?

What’s weird is that I haven’t been to a rock concert in thirteen years.

That’s super weird, really, considering how deeply into music I once was, and how many hundreds of concerts I attended. I can’t explain why, exactly, but I developed a later-in-life disdain for live performances. They suddenly felt goofy and weird to me: Am I watching or listening? Where do I stand? And none of the songs sound right.

You’ll tell me I’m just getting old Whatever the reason, I stopped going, even when the musicians are ones I love.

My last time at a show was in 2010, when I went to see Grant Hart in Cambridge. Prior to that we go all the way back to 2004, when I saw the Mountain Goats, also in Cambridge. Both times I was on the guest list, which made the idea of a night out more appealing. I’m not sure I would’ve gone otherwise. (Somewhere in there was Curtis Eller the banjo guy, and some symphonies, but those don’t count.)

That said, I’m told by a reader that the Bob Mould show in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago was great, and at least half of the songs he played were classics from the Hüsker Dü canon. I wanna say that I wished I’d gone (the last time I watched Mould play live was in 1995). I was in Tanzania on vacation, so my excuse is solid, but even if I’d been home I may not have done it.

Concerts are one thing, but worst of the worst is any kind of live music in a bar or restaurant. There’s almost nothing I hate more. At least at a concert you’re there because, presumably, you enjoy the music of the artist you’re seeing. The music in a bar may or may not be anything you like. It’s intrusive, and conversation becomes difficult.

Here I’ll make this airline-related: On layovers in Accra, Ghana, I used to love hanging out at the poolside bar at the Novotel. It was such a chill place, with the most relaxing vibe. Then they brought in a piano player. Now the racket made talking almost impossible. He’d sing, too, and the beer mugs would crack when he hit the high notes. I had to find a new place.

EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO patricksmith@askthepilot.com

Related Stories:

Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 1
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 2
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 3
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 4
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 5
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 6
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, COVID EDITION

Portions of this post appeared previously in the magazine Salon.

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

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October 25, 2023 · Filed under Uncategorized